When Islam took over as the most powerful religion in the Middle East, science began to flourish faster than the West:
mathematics (algebra and concept of zero and applying it to the quadratic function)
astronomy (Earth is round and calculated diameter)
medicine (surgery while Europeans used leeches)
pharmacology (contagious nature of TB)
optics: 600 years before Galileo was accused of heresy for arguing that the Earth orbited the Sun.
chemistry
botany
philosophy
physics (gravity and momentum)
Muslim Science
Following the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E., science and technology flourished in the Islamic world to a far greater extent than they did in the West. Muslim rulers promoted the translation of Greek philosophy and science texts, and then encouraged further scientific exploration in numerous fields, among them mathematics, astronomy, medicine, pharmacology, optics, chemistry, botany, philosophy, and physics.
In mathematics, Muslim scholars introduced the use of zero, solutions to quadratic equations -- even the Arabic word "algebra."
Muslim astronomers knew the Earth was round and calculated its diameter. Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040) explored momentum, gravity, and optics 600 years before Galileo was accused of heresy for arguing that the Earth orbited the Sun.
Medicine
Medicine was one of the most important fields of endeavor. Muslim doctors were surgically removing cataracts and treating kidney and gallstones while Europeans were still using leeches on their patients. Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna, 980-1037) wrote al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, or the Canons of Medicine, a seminal volume that was the first to recognize the contagious nature of tuberculosis, identify meningitis, and describe all the minute parts of the eye. By the 12th century, the Canons had been translated into Latin, and European medicine relied on this text until well into the 1700s.
Much of the knowledge developed by the Muslims and transmitted to the Europeans enabled Europe to emerge from the Dark Ages into the Renaissance.
General
During the 16th century, the Ottoman astronomer Taqi al-Din made astronomical tables that were considered at least as accurate as those of fellow 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe of Denmark, whose observations of the planets served as the basis for Kepler's Laws of planetary motion. Only a century later, though, the Ottomans and their Muslim contemporaries in Mughal India and the Persian Safavid Empire ceased to support scientific research and innovations.
This change was due in part to the shifting priorities and educational systems of these empires. Not unlike Europe in previous centuries, groups wanting to protect the status quo became more powerful than those advocating growth and experimentation. Meanwhile, building on the earlier accomplishments of Muslim scientists, Europe's scientific and industrial revolutions began to give the West a military and economic advantage over the Islamic world.
By the 19th century, when Middle Eastern states like Egypt, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire decided to develop modern infrastructure, including railroads and telegraph lines, the work had to be contracted to foreign firms. The cash-strapped Middle Eastern governments sold concessions -- the right to develop and then profit from these infrastructure development projects -- to European companies. These opportunities gave European governments an interest in influencing Middle Eastern regimes, in order to both win the contracts and then protect their investments. In this way, the technological and industrial capabilities of the West reinforced its political and economic power in the region. Technological dependence on the West, however, was seen as a threat to the independence of the Islamic world, and resentment against Western power began to rise.
Historically, some of the most important technological achievements in the Middle East were related to the use of water, from the ancient Iranian qanats (underground canals that brought water from the mountains to the arid plain) to the modern dam systems on the Nile and Euphrates Rivers. In 1898, the Aswan Dam became the first major modern dam project, resulting in the successful damming of the Nile. In the 1960s, an expansion of the Aswan Dam was built with Soviet support.
Unfortunately, while these Nile dams regulated the water flow to cropland, generated vital electricity, and shielded Egypt from years of drought, they also introduced environmental problems that have cast a shadow on their overall success. Since the Nile no longer floods, the rich silt that used to fertilize Egyptian fields is instead accumulating in Lake Nasser behind the Aswan Dam. As a result, farmers downstream are forced to use massive amounts of artificial fertilizers, which in turn run off into, and pollute, the Nile.
The overall aridity of the region has motivated some of the richer countries to search for technological solutions to their water requirements. Through sustained investment in research, they have become experts in water desalination, water recycling, and solar energy. The region's oil-poor countries, however, Egypt among them, cannot afford such advanced technologies and remain dependent on more traditional water resources.
Scientific discovery and technological implementation varies widely in the Middle East today. Israel's current position as a technological leader and its close economic relationship with the West stand in sharp contrast to its Arab neighbors. Israel, for example, is a world leader in the development of voice-recognition software for computers.
As in other regions of the world, access to technology parallels the disparity in lifestyles throughout the region. Some people are scarcely aware of the Internet, while others make their living from it. Even so, cheap, portable technologies are transforming the Middle East.
Cellular phones, for example, are increasingly popular in the Middle East, providing telephone access in more remote communities as well as in crowded urban areas. Wireless service bypasses the difficult and expensive requirements for laying out and maintaining telephone cables.
Satellite television news stations like Al-Jazeera provide new and varied sources of information to people in the Middle East who once had access only to government-controlled media. The Internet may have a similar effect.
Internet cafes have sprung up in major cities and in regional centers throughout the Middle East, providing access to news and information for people who cannot afford to buy a computer themselves. In some nations, however, the government is the only Internet provider and may censor the available content.
Oil-poor countries do not have the economic resources to take advantage of these new technologies. The ability to access new technology is related to both economic resources and political openness.
Brief Historical Record:
We start with a brief history of science and technology in the Muslim world, the first place to search for clues to these questions. In a nutshell, the Muslim experience consists of a golden age in the tenth through thirteenth centuries, a subsequent collapse, a modest rebirth in the nineteenth century, and a history of frustration in the twentieth century. The deficiency in Muslim science and technology is particularly intriguing given that Muslims were world leaders in science and technology a millennium ago -- something that distinguishes them from, say, the peoples of Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa.
Golden Age. The period 900-1200 A.D. represents the approximate apogee of Muslim science, which flourished in Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and Cordoba, among other cities. Significant progress was made in such areas as medicine, agronomy, botany, mathematics, chemistry, and optics. As Muslims vied with Chinese for intellectual and scientific leadership, Christian Europe lagged far behind both.3
This golden age was definitely Muslim in that it took place in predominantly Muslim societies, but was it Islamic, that is, connected to the religion of Islam? States were officially Islamic, and intellectual life took place within a self-consciously Islamic environment. Ahmad al-Hassan and Donald R. Hill, two historians of technology, see Islam as "the driving force behind the Muslim scientific revolution when the Muslim state reached its peak."4 But non-Muslims had a major role in this effort, and much of the era's scientific achievements took place in a tolerant and cosmopolitan intellectual atmosphere quite independent of the religious authorities.
Decline. Things started to go awry in the early thirteenth century, when the Muslim world began to stagnate and Europeans surged ahead. Even revisionist historians who challenge this date as the time that decline set in do accept that decline eventually took place. Thus, Marshall Hodgson -- who argues that the eastern Muslim world flourished until the sixteenth century, when "the Muslim people, taken collectively, were at the peak of their power" -- acknowledges that by the end of the eighteenth century, Muslims "were prostrate."5
Whatever its timing, this decline meant that Muslims failed to learn from Europe. In Bernard Lewis's phrasing, "The Renaissance, Reformation, even the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, passed unnoticed in the Muslim World."6 Instead, Muslims relied on religious minorities -- Armenians, Greeks, Jews -- as intermediaries; they served as court physicians, translators, and in other key posts. With their aid, the Muslim world accomplished what is now known as a limited transfer of science and technology.
Decline in science resulted from many factors, including the erosion of large-scale agriculture and irrigation systems, the Mongol and other Central Asian invasions, political instability, and the rise of religious intolerance. In particular, the great theologian Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (1059-1111) used the tools of the philosophers to undermine philosophical and scientific inquiry.
The revival of science. In combination, the Enlightenment and French Revolution made European science accessible to the Muslim world. The former detached science from Christianity, thereby making it palatable to Muslims. The latter, and especially Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, with its entourage of scholars and supplementary mission of knowledge, imposed European power on and brought European science to a Muslim people. Within years, some rulers -- led by Muhammad `Ali of Egypt -- recruited European technicians and sent students to Europe.
Technology takes root. An extraordinarily rapid diffusion of Western technologies throughout most of the Middle East took place in the period 1850-1914. With the approval of local elites, European colonial authorities imposed public-health measures to contain cholera, malaria, and other contagious diseases.7 The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, reduced shipping time and distance and generated new trade. Railways, telegraphs, steamships and steam engines, automobiles, and telephones all appeared. Much of this technology transfer took the form of Middle Eastern governments' granting monopoly concessions to European firms. Muslim rulers had little concern about developing indigenous capabilities in technology adaptation, design, or maintenance.
Science was an afterthought, at best embedded in scientific technologies but not transferred explicitly as knowledge or method. Instead, members of minority communities continued to intermediate by providing clerical and skilled labor. Minorities also helped to establish the first Western education institutions in the region, such as the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut (founded in 1866) and the Jesuits' St. Joseph's College (founded in 1875). These schools and others in Istanbul, Tunis, Tehran, Algiers, and elsewhere primarily served minority communities and Europeans, though some elite Muslims also attended. Middle Eastern medical schools quickly accepted and taught the medical discoveries of Pasteur, Koch, and others concerning microbes and bacteria. The schools contributed to the translation and publication in Arabic of major scientific works and to the organization of the first scientific societies in the region. Such societies were founded in Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, and Istanbul in the late nineteenth century, often sponsoring journals that featured translations. Thus, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, was translated in Arabic journals by 1876, though not in book form until 1918. Throughout this period, Muslim intellectuals presented minimal resistance to the diffusion of Western scientific ideas. For example, the major opposition to Darwinian ideas of evolution came not from Muslim scholars but from Eastern-rite Christians.8
Science stagnates. In the 1914-45 period, Muslims slowly, and often in frustration, attempted to strengthen indigenous science against the imported variety. New universities with an emphasis on engineering and medicine sprang up in Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and the Sudan. During the depression years, however, reduced employment for graduates and increased discontent over the dominant role of expatriates and minorities constrained science and technology.
The nationalist politicians who arose after World War I mainly concentrated on gaining political independence; science and technology hardly concerned them. The one exception was Turkey, which under Kemal Mustafa Atatürk after 1922 launched an ambitious program of industrialization and an expansion of engineering education. Elsewhere -- in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran -- politicians made only faltering attempts at industrialization to serve small local markets. Turnkey, off-the-shelf projects prevailed, especially in engineering; this meant that few scientific inputs existed, most technologies were imported, maintenance was a persistent problem, and limited shop-floor learning took place. Only in the petroleum industry, which after 1914 took on major proportions in Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, did the pattern differ, for multinational firms subcontracted locally such tasks as maintenance engineering and geological surveying.
When Islam took over as the most powerful religion in the Middle East, science began to flourish faster than the West:
Muslim Science
Medicine
General
Brief Historical Record: